September 30
Looking back over my last entry, I realize how distraught I must have been to write those melodramatic lines. But here I am still at Lansdowne Road, and little has changed, except for the ever-increasing pace of work. Nothing more has been said of the incident of the flying jam pot which caused me so much distress, nor have any more murderers passed beneath the window.
I have not seen Alexandra for some time. She has written to say that she is occupied with her Oriental studies — though it is clear that she is also spending a good deal of time in the unsettling company of M. Villemain. Dear Alexandra! She is so worldly, and so eager to embrace every kind of experience. And yet sometimes I feel older than she, and much less innocent. When she shares her secrets I can only listen and offer none in return; for surely even Alexandra would shrink away in horror should I confess what I have done.
In her letter she relates another curious adventure with M. Villemain into what she calls the Unknown, the Inconnu. She writes in French, for she is not as fluent in English on the page as she is in speech. It is a long letter, but with the help of a dictionary from HPB’s study I have been translating it, a little at a time, as an exercise, and now I will transcribe it into this journal.
“My dear Jeanne,” (Alexandra writes)
“M. Villemain has been shut up in his room for several weeks, engaged in mysterious occult practices. Now that he has emerged, he looks so wraithlike that we are all concerned for his health. I decided he might benefit from a little fresh air and exercise. Also, I am anxious to learn more from him about this business of the peculiar painting that can entrap the onlooker. And so I asked him if he would like to come with me to visit the Crystal Palace outside London, where there are concerts and dramatic entertainments. Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed. We made plans to leave early and spend the whole day.
“But I had forgotten how quickly these autumn fogs descend. I woke to find the city shrouded in mist. By the time we were ready to leave the fog had not lifted. ‘Quel dommage,’ said M. Villemain, and proposed that we wait for a better day. However, I had set my mind on this expedition.
‘This is England,’ I pointed out. ‘There may not be a better day.’ At the station we could scarcely make out the shapes of the carriages. ‘Surely the afternoon will be fine,’ I said by way of encouragement. And so we boarded the phantom train, and set out through a veiled and mysterious landscape.
“M. Villemain — who can be a very dull companion — seemed lost in his own thoughts.”
(Ah, so the intriguing M. Villemain has turned out to be not quite so intéressant after all!) But to continue the story:
“There was nothing to be seen through the windows, and lulled by the swaying of the carriage, I must have drifted off. I woke suddenly as the whistle sounded and the train came to a sudden stop. Looking out, I saw that the fog had lifted. But where were we?”
When Alexandra asked a man on the platform, “Is this the Crystal Palace station?” he gave her a very strange look and shouted to the conductor, who told them to get off the train as fast as they could. “How you will smile, Jeanne, when I tell you that this sophisticated traveller had fallen fast asleep on an express train bound for Edinburgh!”
The train whistled and went on its way. Alexandra and M. Villemain were left standing alone on the platform in an autumn drizzle, with no idea where they were, waiting for an evening train that would take them back to London. The ticket office was closed, and the countryside was deserted.
“Not a tea shop nor even a farmhouse to be seen. And it had begun to rain harder, and so we huddled in glum silence on a bench under the porch roof. I was cold, and hungry, and feeling both foolish and thoroughly annoyed.
‘Well, here is an adventure,’ I said to M. Villemain. To which he responded in a mournful tone, ‘Perhaps we are dead.’
“I stared at him. ‘Dead? Whatever are you talking about?’
“‘We could be dead and not even know it. Why would an express train stop for no apparent reason and set us down in this desolate place?’
“Surely he was not serious! I said that there must have been an obstacle on the track.
He replied, in a voice heavy with foreboding, ‘It happened in exactly that way to a member of our Gnostic Society.’”
And then M. Villemain told Alexandra this extraordinary tale. It seems that a man was on a holiday trip with his wife and young son when their train inexplicably stopped. They could hear and see nothing: all the outside world was hidden by a thick white fog. To the man’s surprise his wife took the child’s hand and began to lead him from the carriage. Not sure what to do, the man followed his wife, who seemed to know exactly where she was going. When they came to a hedge, the mother and child somehow found their way to the other side; but the man could not follow, for his way was barred by a tangle of thorny branches. As he sought desperately for a way through, he heard a voice calling out, “You are not expected.” Beyond the hedge he could see, growing ever more distant, the vague shapes of his wife and son, but it was impossible to reach them. A great weariness overcame him, and as he drifted out of consciousness he heard a far-off voice repeating, “You are not expected.”
When he awoke he was in a hospital. It seemed that he and his family had been in a terrible train crash. The mother and child had passed into another world, where they were expected. In spite of his serious injuries the husband would recover, and so he could not break through that thorny hedge into the world beyond.
Alexandra said, in a joking way, “Well, you and I, M. Villemain, I believe we are not yet expected.” But she was astonished to realize that he was in deadly earnest.
“All this is most intriguing,”she writes, “and I mean to study further the various theories about the afterworld, and the spirits of the dead. In meantime, however, since we would be so late getting back to London, I proposed to buy M. Villemain a good dinner in a restaurant, for there would be no hope of getting anything to eat at the Supreme Gnosis.”
In any event, Villemain now seemed in a mood to speak of occult matters, so Alexandra seized the opportunity to question him about the strange incident of the painting.
Why, she wondered, was he afraid that she would be drawn into his painted landscape?
And in reply he began another story, as strange as the first.
A woman — like Villemain an initiate into the occult arts — was viewing a painting of an African landscape, an oasis with palm trees.
As she looked into the painting, she became lightheaded, and it seemed to her that she had somehow entered the painting and was walking among the palm trees, under the hot equatorial sun. For a while she wandered about in the desert, wiping her face with her handkerchief. Suddenly the light changed, she felt a violent shock, and she found herself in the artist’s studio, where it seemed she had fainted. She went to take out her handkerchief, but could not find it. Then she looked at the painting. There was the missing handkerchief, clearly painted into the picture, at the foot of a palm tree where she had dropped it. .
“Ever since,” Alexandra continues, “I have been puzzling about the explanation. Was it merely a collective hallucination? Villemain himself, and others who have seen the painting, swear that previously, no handkerchief had appeared in the scene; but from then on it was clearly visible. It makes me think, Jeanne, that there is much we have not yet discovered about our world.
“Villemain has offered a theory, and I will try to explain as best I can. He says that every landscape in the real world, and even a painted landscape, has its counterpart on the astral plane. So, for example, if an artist paints a picture of a meadow or heath, he has not only created a design on canvas, he has also created a heath or a meadow on that other plane of existence. And herein, said Villemain, the danger lies: each of us also has an astral counterpart, a kind of insubstantial twin. If we are not careful, that astral form could be seized and held captive by this other world that exists on the edge of our own.
“Needless to say, all this makes me wish to explore the subject further. And so, although we did not see the Crystal Palace, the day was not a total loss; and before we took a cab back to our lodgings, we found an excellent Italian restaurant and I bought M. Villemain the fine dinner I had promised.”